A Washington fountain that the Trump administration restored this year is now running brown.
The Meridian Hill Park Cascading Fountain was one of the president’s “beautification” projects in and around the capital for the country’s 250th anniversary celebrations—but it appears to be suffering a fate similar to the algae-filled Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
The fountain, where top Trump administration officials were booed last week by hundreds of protesters while touting the president’s work, is now filled with brown water.
“It’s pretty nasty,” a frequent park visitor told Newsweek.
The Daily Beast also traveled to the scene, about a mile and a half due north of the White House, to see the clearly brown water for ourselves.
There, Daily Beast political reporter Farrah Tomazin spotted a worker vacuuming up sediment from the bottom of the pool.
“All the locals were freaking out,” a national parks contractor said, adding that he had been cleaning up the fountain all day, from the top to the bottom.
Tomazin viewed the fountain’s clear water in May, after it first reopened. A side-by-side look at the fountain then and now shows just how nasty the water has become in the months since.
Reached for comment, the White House referred a Daily Beast inquiry to the Interior Department.
“The National Park Service continues to fine-tune the fountain’s operations after the reopening of the Meridian Hill Cascading Fountain in May,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. “The brown water is sediment as a result of the reopening of two water lines that had been out of service for some time. We expect the water to once again run clean in the next 24-36 hours.”
A substantial amount of funding—nearly $60 million—to renovate nine fountains in the capital has come from national park entrance fees, The New York Times reported in May.
At that time, an Interior Department spokesperson said in part that “D.C. residents and visitors are experiencing working fountains across the district for the first time in decades, all thanks to President Donald J. Trump.”
A White House spokesperson said then, “For the first time in decades, both visitors and residents of Washington, D.C. are able to enjoy fountains and parks that had been long forgotten and neglected.”
They added: “The President’s beautification efforts are incredibly popular and are even publicly supported by Democrats who have an ounce of common sense. President Trump promised to Make D.C. Safe and Beautiful again, and he continues to deliver.”
In addition to fixing up fountains and the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, Trump, 80, is working on two fountains in Lafayette Park. For that job, the administration awarded a no-bid, $17.4 million contract to Clark Construction, the Maryland-based company that is working on his ballroom, the Times reported.
